Installing Linux on recent Sony Vaio Notebook Computers

Welcome to the new home for the z505hs project at sourceforge.net.
This project should be of interest to users of most late-model Sony
Vaio notebooks - we've heard from owners of the PCG-Z505HS,
PCG-Z505HSK, PCG-Z505HE, and PCG-N505VX,

on this topic, new messages will become
available in the archives of the geocrawler mailing
list z505hs-general@lists.sourceforge.net. There is also discussion
on the public forum, so read all three.

News:

Wed Aug 16 2000: An important new page by Alex. Alex, was there ever any consensus on whether
BIOS upgrades are worthwhile?

Mon Jun 5 2000: More sound news - Jeffrey Baker reports that the
new ALSA driver 0.5.8 (from CVS)
now supports the z505hs. On a personal note, I've decided that I
don't like touch pads.

Thu Apr 12 2000: Great news! Dev Mazumdar (the president of
OSS) has fixed the sound drivers for release 393j so they don't
clobber APM, using a machine generously provided by
EmperorLinux.com. I have tried this driver and it does end the
crashes, though I haven't confirmed that everything still works
after a suspend.

Tue Mar 28 2000: Things are much improved with the 2.3.99 kernel,
but I suspect that sound will still crash the machine, and networking
still gets wedged. At least I can insert and eject PCMCIA cards and
suspend and resume with reasonable confidence.

Software:

The PCMCIA package is now part of the kernel, I think its number
is 3.1.11.

Ethernet module is eepro100.

Configuration:

You will need to put the BIOS into ``non-plug-and-play'' mode to
get the latest OSS sound drivers to work, or if your kernel is
older than 2.3.51 to get the ethernet to work.
Go into the BIOS (by hitting F2 when the Sony logo is on the
screen) and look at the ``Advanced'' screen.

To get the ethernet card working put

alias eth0
eepro100

in /etc/conf.modules

Because I don't have a CD-ROM drive, I installed Linux (Redhat
version 6.2) via ethernet. I had to use an external PCMCIA
ethernet card and the pcmcia.img floppy. There is a report that
a beta version of Mandrake allows installation using the eepro100.

Bugs:

According to Todd and Dan, the KDE desktop will prevent the OSS
sound drivers from working. Gnome will not. I use neither.
[Any improvement with the latest OSS drivers?]

After a resume, machine hangs when the eepro100 module is
installed. In fact, rmmod-ing and insmod-ing the eepro100
module also hangs the machine. Here is a grumpy message from the
one and only Don Becker on the subject, pointing to a
more suitable eepro100 driver. It looks pretty old, though -- if
anyone tries this out please let me know.

Inserting or ejecting PCMCIA cards causes the machine to hang.
Adding

PCIC_OPTS="cs_irq=11"

to /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia has solved this problem for
Todd Small, but not for me. The card I've tried inserting and
removing is a SCSI adapter, maybe I should try something else.
Stopping pcmcia card services using /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop
and then ejecting the card does not hang the machine.

Resolved Bugs:

With kernels prior to 2.3.50 you had to turn the machine off
(cold boot) to reset the ethernet card after running Windows.

The latest OSS driver (393j) fixes crash on APM suspend.

Very late development kernels improve the PCMCIA insert/eject
situation.

Links

Help!

If you are running Linux on this machine or the (presumably similar)
PCG-Z505HE and PCG-N505VX, and your experience differs from anything I
have written above, or you have something to add to the above, or (god
bless you) you have a fix for any of this machine's broken features,
please e-mail me at dsfox@cogsci.ucsd.edu.
Thanks, and thanks to everyone who has contributed.
Last modified: Sat Apr 15 05:55:53 PST 2000